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Lee Returns, Saying He ‘Never Wanted to Leave’

PHILADELPHIA — On a frigid Wednesday afternoon with blustery winds and snow showers, Cliff Lee again put on a Phillies jersey and fans began longing impatiently for spring.

Philadelphia’s sporting reputation seemed turned on its head. A historically forlorn team in a supposedly forbidding city with sour, disorderly fans had become the stars’ preferred destination over the moneyed offerings of New York.

Lee said he was not afraid to pitch in the pressurized environment of New York or put off by the behavior of Yankees fans. He just liked Philadelphia better. So tiny Citizens Bank Park, a place many felt that pitchers would seek to avoid like blisters on their fingers, will house perhaps baseball’s top rotation in Lee, Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels.

Given the Phillies’ recent dominance in the National League East, Lee said that returning to Philadelphia, for whom he pitched in the 2009 World Series, was “kind of a no-brainer for me.”

He said he wanted to clear up one misconception about New York. Reports that his wife had been spat upon or had things thrown or poured on her while he pitched for Texas during the American League Championship Series were inaccurate and did not influence his decision, Lee said.

“No one came up to my wife and spit on her,” Lee said, though his wife, Kristen, did confirm Wednesday that Yankees fans spat toward Rangers fans. “Nobody poured anything on her. You go to any stadium and the opposing team stands up and starts cheering, especially in the postseason, fans are going to say something to them, they are going to do things like that. That’s part of it. That story was way overblown. It was false. It had zero to do with the whole thing.”

The reasons he chose the Phillies’ five-year, $120 million offer and turned down more guaranteed money from the Yankees, Lee said, were the chance to win a World Series ring that has eluded him twice the past two seasons with Philadelphia and Texas; the strength of the staff; the chance to throw to a pitcher instead of a designated hitter in the National League; the regular sellouts; and the passion of the fans.

“You can feel the volume,” Lee said. “Every game has got an elevated feel compared to everywhere else. They don’t need a teleprompter to tell them to get up and cheer. The feeling of playing on the field feels different than anywhere else.”

Rudimentary discussions with Lee’s agent were held after the World Series, but Ruben Amaro Jr., the Phillies’ general manager, said that once Texas and New York proposed long-term deals, he thought the Phillies did not have a “snowball’s chance in hell” of re-signing Lee, a 32-year-old left-hander.

Photo

Cliff Lee at a news conference with Ruben Amaro Jr., the Phillies’ general manager, who had traded Lee away after the 2009 World Series.Credit
Associated Press

But discussions between the Phillies and Lee heated up last Friday. The pitcher signaled that Philadelphia was his preferred destination. Eventually, Amaro overcame his reluctance to offer anything more than a three-year deal.

Asked if the re-signing was a tacit admission that it had been a mistake to trade Lee to Seattle for three prospects after the 2009 season instead of keeping him in Philadelphia for 2010, Amaro said, “We needed to replenish our farm system; I didn’t want to leave it bare.”

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But time and circumstance have changed. Amaro has put together the kind of team Phillies fans have long detested about the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox — a team on which many of the best players were bought instead of groomed. Now that once-frugal Philadelphia has joined the big spenders, though, no one here is apologizing.

“I don’t know how fiscally responsible it is, but this was a special circumstance,” Amaro said. “It’s kind of intoxicating when you break down what this means as far as the long-term success of a club. To put these four guys at the top of the rotation, it can make for some compelling baseball.”

In this city, where historical sporting misfortunes have left many fans with the sense that things will always end badly, the recent success of the Phillies (they have won the National League East the past four years and the World Series in 2008) and the Lee signing have forced a somewhat changed attitude from Rocky-inspired, blue-collar underdog to expectant favorite.

“I think the whole atmosphere in the city has changed the last four years,” the former Phillies reliever Mitch Williams said. “Ten years ago, fans came to the ballpark asking, ‘What’s going to happen to hold us back?’ Now they come with the mind-set, What’s going to happen to help us win?”

On Wednesday, the front page of The Philadelphia Daily News pictured Christmas stockings stuffed with the Phillies’ new four-man rotation. In The Philadelphia Inquirer there seemed to be as much glee at stealing Lee away from New York as there was in bringing him back to Philadelphia.

Under the headline, “For once, we take a bite out of the Big Apple,” Frank Fitzpatrick wrote, “To be honest, it felt so good because we’ve developed an enormous inferiority complex over the years” in being sandwiched between Washington and New York.

“New York had the money and sex appeal,” Fitzpatrick wrote. “Washington had the power. Philadelphia had cheesesteaks, unruly fans and a lot of ‘used to be.’ ”

Now Philadelphia has something New York badly wanted.

“We didn’t beat the Yankees in the ’50 World Series or in ’09,” Larry Shenk, a longtime Phillies spokesman, said with a laugh. “Now we get to beat them.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 16, 2010, on Page B13 of the New York edition with the headline: Lee Returns, Saying He ‘Never Wanted to Leave’. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe